Lush Life

by Richard Price

  “Some sad shit,” Clarence said, sipping from a cup of take-out coffee.

  “You knew him?”

  “Who, Eric?”

  “The vic.”

  “Nah. He just started on days. I’m nights.”

  “How about last night?”

  “I was about to say, although I did see the three of them at last call.”

  “And . . .”

  “The fat guy was shitfaced, the vic was like halfway back to sober.”

  “How about Cash.”

  “Cash . . .” Clarence shook his head, blew on his coffee. “I tell you, man, I hope you got some hard evidence on him because, Eric? I don’t get that.”

  Matty felt sick. “Does he ever carry a piece?”

  “Not that I ever saw.”

  “And not last night.”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “How’d he strike you coming out of here?”

  “Unhappy. I mean, Eric’s an OK guy, but he always struck me as an individual needs to have a little more fun in his life, you know?”

  Clarence paused to watch a cab pull up, three women loaded down with shopping bags exiting from the rear seat.

  “Although today don’t seem like it’s gonna be a good day for him to start, huh?”

  Although still off-duty, Clarence held the door to the restaurant for the women, the last one inside turning back and dropping a quarter in his coffee cup, the liquid dancing above the rim.

  White-faced with embarrassment, she turned on her heel and racewalked to her friends at the bar.

  “Happens all the time,” he murmured, pouring his drink into the gutter.

  “So you’re doing OK, Clarence?”

  “I’m doing what I got to be doing, you know?” The kid hungry to say more, but then Yolonda rang.

  “Hey, Matty,” she said, “guess who’s awake.”

  Walking into the hospital room, they came up on either side of Steven Boulware’s bed.

  Blood sick, stomach pumped, flat on his back, and sprouting IVs from both arms, the kid still managed to project an air of thick sensuality, his hooded eyes both vacant and on the prowl.

  He scanned their IDs, then looked away, as if ashamed. “How’s Ike?” His voice metallic with hangover.

  “Ike?” Matty said.

  “What happened last night?” Yolonda tilted her chin at him.

  “Are you serious?”

  They stared at him, waiting.

  He stared back, as if the question were mined.

  “What do you remember?” Matty said as placidly as he could.

  Boulware slowly inhaled, exhaled, remained silent.

  “I know,” Yolonda said tenderly, smoothing back the hair on his forehead. “But talk to us.”

  “We were by my building, the three of us, late,” he began. “And these two guys come out of nowhere, they must have been laying up for somebody. One had a gun, said something like, ‘Give it up, fork it over.’ I’m like, shit . . .”

  Matty and Yolonda looked at each other, Matty’s mind a scramble. “This older guy from Ike’s restaurant that was with us, I can’t remember his name, I think he just did what they said.” Boulware paused. “But then Ike, Ike goes and gets all chesty about it, I heard him say to the guy, something like, ‘Not tonight, my man.’ Or, I don’t know, something to the effect of get fucked . . . And then I think, I think he started to go for the guy.” Boulware closed his eyes, then crossed his arms over his chest, a pharaoh in repose.

  “What do you mean, you ‘think,’ ” Yolonda said calmly, starting to balloon with anger.

  Boulware continued to play corpse, long enough for Matty to want to rip the IVs out of his arms.

  “We’re going to need you to look at some photo arrays, sit down with a sketch artist,” Yolonda said, glaring at Matty. “Like, today.”

  “Honestly?” Boulware winced, opened his eyes. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “We’ll bring everything here,” Yolonda said, making it sound like great fun. “You won’t even have to get out of bed.”

  “No, it’s not . . .” He craned his neck to the right, a yearning for escape in the upward roll of his eyes.

  “What’s the problem, Steve?” Matty asked, his bottled distress adding a little more zip to his tone than usual.

  “Look. Last night? I have . . . I was off my nut. Ike and that other guy were actually kind of holding me up. But as soon as I saw that gun? I just hit the deck and stayed there. And my eyes were closed the whole time after that.”

  “Playin’ possum, huh?” Yolonda said as if amused.

  “I’m not going to lie to you. I was scared. I mean, I was off-my-ass drunk too, but I was really fuckin’ scared.” He paused, looking at them for sympathy. “So I went with the drunk thing.”

  “The drunk thing.”

  “I wasn’t faking, ask anybody here, but sometimes, when I’m good and rocked? I get into this zone where I can tell myself I’m physically more this, or more that, than I really am, and . . . it becomes true. And it’s not just with making myself more drunk. It could be like, making myself stronger, faster, have a better voice, whatever.”

  “You ever tell yourself you can fly?” Yolonda asked.

  “Look, I saw that gun and that thing I do just took over, like a survival reflex. For all I know, it just might’ve saved my life, but . . . I mean, it’s not like I feel proud of myself about it. I don’t feel . . . shit, I mean even after the cops came, I was still so ripped I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t . . .”

  Again he looked to them for understanding, a free pass; got only stares.

  “But you were definitely held up at gunpoint,” Matty said.

  “Oh yeah. Yes . . .”

  “By two males.”

  “Yes.” Then, “I’m pretty sure it was two, could have been more, but like I said . . .”

  “Your eyes were closed.”

  “Well, how many voices do you remember?”

  “Just what I said. Ike and the guy with the gun.”

  “Think on it again.”

  “Maybe you should close your eyes,” Yolonda said. “You know, get in the mood.”

  Matty cut her a look, Yolonda twisting her lips.

  “I think there was a girl there.”

  “A girl was with them?”

  “No. Separate, like, behind us, across the street maybe, I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean, a girl? A child?”

  “No. Just young, like, my age? Like, arguing with someone, maybe?”

  “Arguing about what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did she sound like, white, black, Latino . . .” Yolonda’s anger made her rattle through the litany as if she were bored.

  “Black. She kind of sounded black.”

  “What do you mean ‘kind of.’ ”

  “Like, educated?”

  “Nicely put,” Yolonda said.

  “What?”

  “This, educated black girl, who was she arguing with, male or female?”

  “I’m pretty sure male.”

  “White, black?”

  “His voice?”

  “Yes,” Yolonda said, “his voice.”

  “White maybe? I’m not . . . I don’t know.”

  Matty stared at Yolonda, the both of them thinking the same thing.

  “No,” Yolonda said to Matty, “no fucking way.”

  Matty was unable to respond, to put their troubles in size order as he tried to calculate the dozens, the hundreds, of warrants they would now be executing on the Lower East Side in the next twenty-four hours on the off chance that one of their homegrown skeeves out there knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who overheard someone; as he tried to calculate the hundreds of old robbery-pattern reports to be pored over, the reinterviewing to be done, the recanvassing, the threatening, the cajoling, the bargaining, the bullshitting, the bluffing, the whole hopeless pig-in-a-poke cluster fuck this was about to become if Boulware�
�s account turned out to be accurate, which it probably would; if the witness accounts turned out to be flawed, as they probably would; as they tried to play catch-up with a robbery-homicide nearly fourteen hours after the horses had left the gate.

  “So is Ike OK?” Boulware asked sheepishly.

  “Your friend Ike?” Yolonda said brightly. “He’s dead.”

  At six in the evening, Kevin Flaherty, the ADA who had reinterviewed Randal Condo on the street earlier that morning, went at him again, this time in one of the squad’s small rooms, Matty pacing outside like an expectant father.

  “Go back to right before you heard the shot. What were you doing?” Flaherty said.

  “Walking up Eldridge towards Nikki while she’s walking down Eldridge towards me.” Condo looked like he hadn’t ever gone to sleep from the night before.

  “Talking to each other?”

  “Most likely.”

  “With some fraction of a block between you?”

  “I guess.”

  “That takes raised voices. You were raising your voice at each other?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Arguing?”

  “No.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Condo took a moment, then shrugged. “Possibly.”

  “People say possibly to me they usually mean probably.”

  “So what if we were?” His voice smaller than the bellicose response would have suggested.

  “Randal, dead of night, your girlfriend’s walking a half a block ahead of you. You were having a fight, yes?”

  He didn’t answer, Flaherty cursing himself, this all so fucking obvious now.

  “Now, I told you this morning we had a number of people told the canvass they heard shouting in the street around the time of the shooting, yeah? Voices raised loud enough to be heard in fourth-, fifth-, sixth-floor apartments, you remember me asking you about that?”

  “We weren’t that loud.”

  “Your girl’s a half a block down the street and you’re still going at it? Trust me, you were.”

  Condo breathed through his nose, looked off. “Possibly.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else. People who get into arguments in the street? In public like that? You got to be pretty deep into it not to give a shit about who’s watching. In fact, I’d say that there could be a three-ring circus twenty feet away, they’d barely know it.”

  Condo closed his eyes, rubbed his face.

  “So, I’m thinking, if, when rounding Delancey onto Eldridge, you two are going at it so hot and heavy that she starts stomping away from you so that now you have to start yelling just to keep it going? There’s no way you were watching that encounter develop across the street.”

  “I didn’t make it up.”

  “And then it just gets worse. Because at some point you must’ve said something, yelled out something got this woman so pissed off that all of a sudden she does a one-eighty and starts coming back at you? Now, at that point there’s no way she’s not getting your undivided attention. No way you’re checking out anything across the street. That’d be like the quarterback sizing up some blonde in the stands while a linebacker’s coming for him straight up the middle. And that leads me to believe that what first got your attention over there was hearing that gun go off, and by the time you really gave them a good look-see, whatever had gone down was already a done deal. You might have seen the two of them falling and the third guy booking into the building, but I don’t think you can honestly tell me if before that there were originally three, four, or five people, who actually had the gun, or if anybody else took off other than the guy running into the building.” The ADA took a beat to let this sink in. “All they would have needed was a split-second lead on your eye and they’re out into the shadows like they never existed.”

  “Look, I saw what I saw.”

  “That’s my point.”

  Condo took a breath. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “Not really, but go ahead.”

  Flaherty watched him fire up, watched him think.

  “We have a guy in the Tombs right now pretty much based on what you told us,” Flaherty said, then leaning forward, lowered his voice. “It’s not criminal to be mistaken, Randal. Sometimes we confuse the words see and hear, especially when something goes down so fast and unexpected.”

  “OK,” he said hoarsely.

  “So.” The ADA tapped Condo’s crossed knee. “Are you still sure we have the right guy?”

  “I saw what I saw.”

  “Just answer yes or no.”

  “No.”

  Flaherty sat back and finger-combed his hair, resisting the impulse to pull it out by the fistful.

  “Just out of curiosity,” his own voice growing hoarse now, “what exactly were you two fighting about?”

  “The definition of a word.”

  “What word would that be?”

  Condo closed his eyes. “Girlfriend.”

  “I specifically asked you if you heard arguing.” Bobby Oh was not in the habit of raising his voice, so he didn’t now, but it was all there in his bloodshot eyes.

  “Well, if you’re doing the arguing yourself, do you consider that ‘hearing arguing’?” Nikki Williams responded queasily.

  Bobby leaned forward in his chair so abruptly that she flinched. “Say again?”

  “It’s like, if you’re already underwater, do you think of yourself as wet?”

  He stared at her until she looked away.

  “He always told me I was only the second woman of color he had ever had a relationship with, then somebody at the party tells me that actually I was the fifth.” Nikki talking to her lap now, avoiding his eyes. “That’s a very creepy kind of lie.”

  Bobby made himself look away from her.

  “Then on the way home he goes and improves things by yelling out from halfway down the block that those other three were just about the sex.”

  Bobby Oh was Night Watch. He was here, he was still here, eighteen hours after his tour began, strictly as a favor to Matty Clark because he had developed a rapport with this witness, this bullshit witness. He could go home now and nobody would think the lesser of him even though he had helped screw the pooch on this one as much as anyone else.

  “I didn’t want to say anything about it,” Nikki said, “because it was nobody else’s business.”

  Then, “It was humiliating.”

  Then, tearing up, “I’m so sorry.”

  Eric had been standing in a corner of the holding cell for three hours. Four cells all directly faced the CO command desk, their capacity twenty prisoners each. In his particular cell, thirteen prisoners, most of them seeming to take being here in stride, were standing or sitting together and talking as if at a bar or in a barracks, the only swirl of action coming about when a new arrestee had made it through the maze and stood in front of the desk with his accompanying paperwork and escort. Most of the prisoners saw this as an occasion to drape themselves on the front bars and call out to the cops or COs that an innocent man was in here, that they were still waiting for that Tylenol or pay lawyer or asthma medicine or whatever came to mind. The only ones in the cell who didn’t seem to know anybody else or join in this periodic rush to the bars were Eric and a blaze-eyed black man, slack-bellied and nuts, wearing his T-shirt around his neck like a dickey as he disjointedly paced the perimeter whispering to himself. For hours now this guy had been keying on Eric, approaching him in his corner every few minutes on his aimless journey though the cage and asking to borrow his E-ZPass, Eric just ignoring him and slipping back into his own inner static like slipping back into bed: The reason he ran into 27 Eldridge was because . . . The reason he didn’t call 911 was because . . . The reason he never even thought to ask if Ike Marcus had survived was because . . . The reason he had lied about everything was because . . .

  Lost as he was in his fractured and incomplete ruminations, not even the ambient stink of the cage got through to him; not even the occas
ional rush of phantom hands in his pockets, the mumbled threats; not even his own name being called over and over by a pregnant CO was enough to pull him out of the forest fire that was his head, until she finally barked, “Hey, Cash. Do you want to go home or not?”

  When he looked up, he saw that the same two detectives who had brought him here three hours ago were back, looking jumpy as ever about getting the hell out.

  • • •

  The first car stop of the evening came right at sundown, the Quality of Life taxi just happening to be there as a Nissan Sentra ran a red light in front of the Dubinsky Co-ops on the eastern end of Grand; no need to justify the pullover.

  Lugo and Daley, working as a solo team this tour, walked up on either side of the car, cross-beaming the front seats. When the driver, a beefy crew-cut white guy with an open box of KFC on his lap, rolled down his window, the weed stank curled out like steam from a sauna.

  “You got to be shitting me.” Lugo reared back, fanning the air. “Make my job a little hard at least.”

  “Sorry.” The driver, still chewing, half-smiled, a glistening sliver of dark meat pasted to the corner of his mouth.

  The passenger, also white, a vacant-faced teenager blinged out in triple-X-size threads and a sideways baseball cap from the Negro Leagues, stared directly into the beam of Daley’s flashlight as if it were a movie screen.

  “C’mon out.” Lugo opened the driver’s door, but instead of hopping to it, the driver purposefully wiped the grease from his fingers one at a time, then leaned across the lap of his passenger to open the glove compartment.

  “Whoa!” Lugo lunged forward, seizing the man’s wrist with one hand, fumbling for his gun with the other.

  “OK, OK,” the driver said easily. “I was just getting out my ID.”

  “Did I ask you to?” Lugo near shouted, his hand, still trembling, gripping the butt of his unpulled Glock.

  The kid in the passenger seat was grinning now, his eyes red and waggling. Daley reached in and pulled him out by the back of his shirt, dropped him belly-down on the hood, and held him there.

  “I said get the fuck out of the car,” Lugo bellowed, yanking on the already open driver’s door so violently that it slammed itself shut on the rebound.